swans

Abide. Trust. Surrender to the Flow.

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

This morning on the way to school, a long, rangy V of geese flew over the highway. It took me a moment to realize that they were snow geese rather than the Canada geese we see almost every day. A few miles later another V slid through the low clouds, this one in perfect formation, only a dozen or so birds, and again, I needed to re-arrange my sense of what I was seeing. This was no flock of geese, but a small flock of swans, their long necks a clear sign of who they were.

A week or so ago, my friend Suzy and I were talking about what swans mean: grace, flow, surrender to what is, trust in the process. I needed that conversation. I have been feeling like I haven’t been trying hard enough to figure out how to make more time in my life to write. I feel guilty because I can’t keep up with the work of teaching, and then guiltier still because I am pushing the writer’s life aside while I try to make peace with the grading. Surrender to the flow, said Suzy. Abide. Trust. Stop trying to push the river. Flow with it instead. I don’t know quite where that leads me toward making peace with my teacher/writer divide, but it eases the pressure.

And today the swans, following the geese, trailing behind them those words: “You do not have to be good.” Because that’s always what the geese say, since Mary. And today in class, a student did a presentation on a poet. His poet was Mary Oliver. And his featured poem? “The Wild Geese.” So it’s message upon message upon message.

There are words racing across the sky, in birds, in snowflakes, in cloud formations. And flowing in the rivers and streams, across lakes and oceans. And scattered in pebbles and plant-life all around us on the earth. So much to learn from. So much to listen to. So many texts to be read and understood.

Gratitude List:
1. Swans and snow geese, and the Canadas too.
2. The talented teamwork of the cast of our school’s musical. They were amazing!
3. Leaning in to the hard questions
4. Reconciliations
5. Tea

May we walk in Beauty!

Monday’s Messages:
“Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, revelling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.”
―bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope

“Especially now, when views are becoming more polarized, we must work to understand each other across political, religious and national boundaries.” ―Jane Goodall

“When the people were great stones
we silently watched the dawn
we listened to the wind rushing over the mountains
we spoke the language of mist and dreams
and we could feel the pulsing rhythm
of the living heartbeat of the Earth.”
―Beth Weaver-Kreider

“A woman cannot make the culture more aware by saying ‘Change.’ But she can change her own attitude toward herself, thereby causing devaluing projections to glance off. She does this by taking back her body. By not forsaking the joy of her natural body, by not purchasing the popular illusion that happiness is only bestowed on those of a certain configuration or age, by not waiting or holding back to do anything, and by taking back her real life, and living it full bore, all stops out. This dynamic self-acceptance and self-esteem are what begins to change attitudes in the culture.”
―Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes

“Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.”
―Pema Chödrön

“Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once,
but of stretching out to mend the part of the world
that is within our reach.”
—Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Watching the Swans

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

You know the story of the girl who had twelve brothers? Their stepmother wanted to get rid of the brothers so her own son would inherit the family fortune, so she turned the brother to swans. The girl discovered the treachery and traveled to the Fairy Queen where she learned how to break the spell–she had to harvest and dry, spin and weave nettles into cloth, and then sew the cloth into shirts.  After many terrible trials, she finally managed the job, but an emergency kept her from completing the twelfth before she had to free them, so the youngest brother lived the rest of his life with swan wings.

Of all the compelling elements of this story that I return to again and again, the part that always takes me into the enchantment is the longing the girl feels when she sees the swans flying. The story taps into the human sense of ache and desire that comes with watching the strings of birds flying so high above earth, and hearing the wild barking of the swans as they travel northward.

Sometimes I am the sister, determined to save the others, to bring it all ’round right in the end. Sometimes I am that youngest brother, part human-part swan, doomed to live between great longings, grateful for both lives, exhilarated by the power of straddling worlds.

Gratitude List:
1. A sweet day off chaperoning a field trip with my second grader and his class to Nixon Park
2. Tundra swans
3. Gulls carpeting a field in white
4. Getting some exercise
5. A good novel (right now it’s Patricia McKillip’s Riddlemaster of Hed series–third time through)

May we walk in Beauty!

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

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There is much I would write this morning, so much I need to learn about myself today, if only I could write it out.  There is a prayer of sorts, waiting to find its way into the world, to cast its golden threads through the air.

There is a poem waiting too, about a mother and a daughter, about the house of the heart, about how I want to join with a village of women to encircle that house, to sing, to gather river water, to cook beans and rice, to comb their hair, to sit in silence, to hold their feet in our hands, to anoint them with precious oils.  Perhaps this is that poem.

Meanwhile, two boys are on the edge of battle in the background, and I must go and open the door on my day.  Here was this moment, and now it is passing, and another is coming to meet me.  All of it is holy, perhaps, even the name-calling over there on the fringes. If only I can listen closely enough, perhaps I will begin to understand a little of the song that surrounds us.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Swans!  Yesterday I saw a small flock flying westward, toward the River, as we were driving east.  There may have been twelve of them.
2. The twist of that sycamore on the corner of Walnut and Lime, spiraling upward through the forest of city buildings toward the light.
3. Tabea’s kombucha.  She has a magic touch.  I am loving this little bubbly jarful of chai-flavored deliciousness.
4. Teachers, again: Yesterday we went to the Science Festival at the Lancaster Science Factory.  There was an exhibit there which was running two 3D printers.  We were there when they started printing out a ratchet, using the exact program which NASA sent to the International Space Station a couple weeks ago.  This caught Ellis’s attention and he stood there at the table–asking questions and watching, and telling other kids about it–for most of the hour and 39 minutes that it took to print it.  The people at the table were kind and gentle teachers, understanding his quirky obsession and blessing it, delighting in his questions, and never talking down to him.  If he grows up to be a scientist or engineer, I will credit this moment as important in that.  In the end, they gave him the ratchet.
5. Kestrel on a cornstalk, wind in her feathers.

May we walk in Beauty!